Governing was always difficult for conservatives, but as they return to the opposition, they are rediscovering their skill at blame evasion. – Thomas Frank
The pursuit of the vibrant seems to be the universal job description of the nation’s city planners nowadays. It is also part of the Obama administration’s economic recovery strategy for the nation. – Thomas Frank
People getting their fundamental interests wrong is what American political life is all about. – Thomas Frank
Selling public property is the true Chicago way. Had Mr. Obama not been elected president, the nation’s business journals would be falling over one another to praise his city for its daring, market-friendly innovations. – Thomas Frank
Above all else stands the burning question of bipartisanship. Whatever else the politicians might say they’re about, our news analysts know that this is the true object of the nation’s desire, the topic to which those slippery presidential spokesmen need always to be dragged back. – Thomas Frank
As you may recall, Truman was extremely unpopular when he finally left Washington in 1953, thanks largely to the Korean War. Today, however, he is thought to have been a solidly good president, a ‘Near Great’ even, in the terminology of those surveys of historians they do every now and then. – Thomas Frank
Joe Klein is the flower of American political journalism, a sharp raconteur who shows traces of the gonzo style that was in vogue when he was honing his craft at Rolling Stone back in the day. – Thomas Frank
When money is exchanged for pregnancy, some believe, surrogacy comes close to organ-selling, or even baby-selling. – Thomas Frank
Americans have known about mounting inequality and king-sized Wall Street bonuses for years. But we also had an entire genre of journalism dedicated to brushing the problem off. – Thomas Frank
Just as the financial crisis has created toxic assets and ‘zombie’ financial institutions, so has it transformed conservatism into a movement of the living dead. – Thomas Frank
In America, we no longer have an institutionalized, organized way of calling business to task – of taking them to account for what they’ve done – and this is especially true in the cultural realm. – Thomas Frank
Can policy be both wise and aggressively partisan? Ask any Republican worth his salt and the answer will be an unequivocal yes. Ask a Democrat of the respectable Beltway variety and he will twist himself into a pretzel denying it. – Thomas Frank
There is much to dislike about President Obama’s approach to the financial crisis. But opposition, it seems, will have to come from somewhere other than conservatism. The party out of power is also a party out of touch. – Thomas Frank
I think there’s great potential for autonomy, but we have to remember that we live in a world where people may have free will but have not invented their circumstances. – Thomas Frank
Mr. Obama still has time to reverse course. A great deal depends on it. To fail on health care yet again might well be the ‘Waterloo’ Republicans dream of. – Thomas Frank
Yes, Democrats can prove that America pays more for health care than other countries; yes, they have won the dispute that private health insurance is needlessly expensive. But what they’ve lost is the argument that we are a society. – Thomas Frank
In small towns, bored teenagers turn their eyes longingly to the exciting doings in the big cities, pining for urban amenities like hipster bars and farmers’ markets and indie-rock festivals. Like everyone else, they want the vibrant and they will not be denied. – Thomas Frank
We are watching industries crumble, Wall Street firms disappear, unemployment spike, and unprecedented government intervention. And our designated opinion leaders want to know: Is Obama up this week? Is he down? And is his leadership style more like Bill Clinton’s, or Abraham Lincoln’s? – Thomas Frank
Privatizing bits of the prison industry was a step in the right direction, but what we didn’t have – until recently – were proper instruments for incentivizing the judiciary. That’s what the ‘kids for cash’ judges were apparently experimenting with. – Thomas Frank
In the last James Bond movie, the villain was a culture captain, a tycoon of culture, a Murdoch figure. It’s not as if people don’t know what is going on. – Thomas Frank
There are few things in politics more annoying than the Right’s utter conviction that it owns the patent on the word ‘freedom’ that when its leaders stand up for the rights of banks to be unregulated or capital gains to be untaxed, that it is actually and obviously standing up for human liberty, the noblest cause of them all. – Thomas Frank
American conservatism depends on its continued dominance and even for its very existence on people never making connections about the world, connections that until recent were treated as obvious or self-evident everywhere on the planet. – Thomas Frank
Former President Bill Clinton, who is widely regarded as a political mastermind, may have sounded like a traditional liberal at the beginning of his term in office. But what ultimately defined his presidency was his amazing pliability on matters of principle. – Thomas Frank
Journalism has a special, hallowed place for stories of its practitioners’ persecution. – Thomas Frank
In the subprime mortgage industry, bankers handed out iffy loans like candy at a parade because such loans meant revenue and, hence, bonuses for executives in the here-and-now. – Thomas Frank
When done right – or wrong, depending on how you look at it – deficits remove liberal options from the table. Suddenly there’s no money for building bridges or inspecting meat. Not surprisingly, running up a deficit is a strategy favored by the wrecking crew for its liberal-killing properties. – Thomas Frank
Back in the days when the market was a kind of secular god and all the world thrilled to behold the amazing powers of private capital, the idea of privatizing highways and airports and other bits of our transportation infrastructure made a certain kind of sense. – Thomas Frank
Thanks to a deal finalized in 2008, Chicago’s parking meters will be operated for the next 75 years by a group of investors put together by Morgan Stanley, including the sovereign wealth fund of Abu Dhabi. – Thomas Frank
Under the administration of George W. Bush, you will recall, federal spending grew pretty significantly. At the same time, the number of people directly employed by the federal government shrank. One of the factors that explained the difference was contracting. – Thomas Frank
It is always a disappointment to turn from forthright consideration of some subject – whether from the Left or the Right, a poet or a plumber – to the Beltway version, in which the only aspects of the issue that matter are the effects it will have on the fortunes of the two parties and the various men in power. – Thomas Frank